Welcome to holidays in a recession. Retailers play chicken with discounts. Office parties are downsized or terminated. E-cards from friends are caught in spam filters while paper cards arrive from people you’ve never heard of. Public school teachers are forced to refuse gifts from parents of their students. “Bonus” is a dirty word. The economy […]

Can companies actually grow stronger during a recession? What can they do to capitalize on the problems that their rivals encounter during tough economic times? Suppose you have a sturdy balance sheet, low debt, and plentiful amounts of cash. How can you employ these strengths to take on rivals who have been weakened considerably? I’m […]

Today’s great recession is invisibly scarring business. In China’s Guandong province, one of the world’s biggest manufacturing hubs, over 62,000 companies shut down in the last six months of 2008–or, roughly, 340 units a day. As demand from the US and Europe fell, leaving factory owners with large inventories of raw materials and finished products, […]

China-based McKinsey & Company consultants Jimmy Hexter and Jonathan Woetzel are co-authors of Operation China: From Strategy to Execution The liquidity crisis in the United States and the probable downturn in America’s economy this year has executives in America and Europe scrambling to design plans to navigate through the crisis. Some in the West also […]

One thing this recession can provide executives is more time. Typically the pace of business slows during a recession so it creates opportunity for dialogue and reflection. This gives business leaders an opportunity to adopt a “fresh take.” Adopting a fresh take is what John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, is seeking to do. Since […]

The longer a recession drags on, the greater the growth of interpersonal trust among the population, according to an analysis of survey data from 10 Latin American countries by Elizabeth A.M. Searing of Georgia State University. For each additional year of a recession (holding all else constant), the probability that people will agree that “most […]

What can innovative businesses learn from a punk rock legend? Plenty. Here’s an optimistic big-picture view of the current crisis from the Guardian’s John Harris: recessions are good for the imagination. Lean times, many observers point out, tend to lead to a surge in creativity. The Roaring Twenties have their fans, but plenty of people […]

John Quelch, Harvard Business School professor and coauthor of Greater Good. In a tough economy, companies can succeed if they understand their customers’ evolving consumption patterns and fine-tune their marketing strategies accordingly.

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